Perma red, p.12
Perma Red, page 12
“And I ain’t giving you any,” Baptiste said. “Just one more round,” he said, “and we’ll be out of here.”
“I want you to know I’ve called the cops,” Sheila said. “They’ll be here anytime. You’d be doing yourself a favor to leave.”
“One more round,” Baptiste said a little louder.
I knew I’d gotten my cue to step in, but I wanted to see what would happen. Everything was still under control. I decided to wait. Sheila Owens took a swig of her own drink. “Can you read?” she asked Baptiste. When he lifted his head to her he was weak eyed with booze. “The sign,” she spoke again, “you read it?”
“Lady,” he said, and then as if to get another start at it, “lady, I not only read the sign, I memorized it.” She seemed almost pleased with the answer. “OK,” she said, “but I want you to know, I’m not responsible.”
“Sounds familiar,” Yellow Knife said.
Louise drooped toward Yellow Knife. She couldn’t drink another thing. She was ready to go under. Sheila slapped down two shots in front of him then went back to her talk with Stoner.
“I’m lining it up,” Baptiste said to Louise. Louise said something that made no sense.
I watched Yellow Knife tip those small glasses to the ceiling. I watched the single rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he plied them down. Louise was close to falling and Baptiste was making a poor attempt to hold her up. I stepped forward, slamming the screen door behind me, and saw Baptiste Yellow Knife set his last drink on the bar.
“About time you got here, Kicking Woman,” Sheila said.
Yellow Knife braced Louise and helped her to stand. Then he scooped her up in his arms and I found myself stupidly thinking about Aida’s romance novels, the dizzy covers of men rescuing women. I was stunned by the sight of her pale throat as her head tipped back and her red hair caught the light. Even her dusty bare feet looked pretty. I felt powerless again. Warm blood pulsed in my knees. “Out of my way,” Yellow Knife said. The tattoo on his dark hand spelled out her name. I felt the tickling sweep of Louise’s dress, the brief softness of her hair on my hands as he carried her out the door.
Sheila Owens leaned down hard on the bar top, staring at me. Harvey Stoner held a glass halfway to his lips and swirled the ice in his drink, looking at me too. “Hell of a lot of good you are,” Sheila said, her red mouth frowning. I couldn’t deny that I was of no use. The only good thing I could do now was leave too. As I was walking out the door I heard Sheila Owens say, “Damn Indians.” Harvey Stoner only snorted and I wished the bastard would snort his drink down the wrong gullet.
I got in the cruiser and drove, heading toward Flathead Lake. The clouds lit the high moon. It was starting to turn toward winter. Cold lined the seats of the car and I could see my breath. Summer seemed distant. I started thinking about my wife, about Louise and Yellow Knife, the way the world seems to spin us dizzy. I wondered why I had ended up with a lonesome wife and an unhealthy hankering for a woman I could never have. Aida likes to say we get what we deserve. And I didn’t want to think about Aida and what she had gotten from me. I thought about fishing Dog Lake in lazy circles and the sky above me pink with dusk, knowing I deserved only the dream of fish and sometimes that was enough. Now I wondered what would satisfy me. What would be enough to settle me. It seemed to me I was changing like a familiar place inching toward strangeness, because I was seeing myself differently. And I had the creeping feeling I should jump beneath a table or look out the window to see what was coming.
I was restless. Even after my shift had ended I wasn’t ready to go home and entertain my old thoughts of Louise. I wanted to be finished with her then. I went to the office and stared at my pile of paperwork. I didn’t get home until midafternoon, feeling guilty for the thousandth time that I had left my wife so long alone.
Aida met me at the door with news of her own. Louise had been to the house. I wanted to know what had happened, felt the desire to know rise in me. I sat down at the kitchen table and tried to act disinterested. I fingered the stitching of the tablecloth.
“I’m beat,” I said. My years on the force had taught me a few things. I had learned that when people think you are too anxious to hear their stories they shut right up like they hadn’t realized they were offering you something of value. It was a good lesson too. It worked.
“She was just outside,” Aida said, almost breathless, “outside with that man.”
I slipped off my jacket and let it rest on the back of the chair. I drummed my fingers on the table and looked at the salt and pepper shakers. After a long enough while I asked, “Did she come to see me?”
Aida shrugged her shoulders. “I think she was just looking for a place to run. They were fighting,” she said.
“Was she hurt?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“Her nose was bleeding if that’s what you mean. But she wasn’t hurt. She was fighting him.” I looked at Aida. She had just washed her hair. Little dribbles of water stained the shoulders of her blouse. “She hauled off and kicked him in the balls,” she said. “Last I saw of him he was hurting.” I didn’t care about Yellow Knife. I was pleased to hear he’d gotten a good swift kick to his best memories.
“Where’d she go?” I asked but I couldn’t hide my concern. My voice had shifted an octave higher.
“How would I know,” Aida said. “Is she all you care about?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, lying, knowing exactly what she meant. But Aida was onto my game. She cooked me eggs with so much Tabasco I coughed red faced for an hour. She hummed a high tune at the kitchen sink as she scalded every dish and stacked them in the sink rack steaming. I had to stay around the house. Aida would be wondering where I was off to. It was my weekend. I split green wood for two days, only stopping to eat and sleep. Aida stood by the window, watching me work, her small face haggard and hollow in the yellow kitchen light. In the dimming cold I was chopping my troubles away. Sweat lifted from my back in a shimmering cloud. I was forgetting, I told myself, I was forgetting Louise. But I was fooling myself, I was trying to forget the man I was. At the end of that long weekend I returned to work to hear the news that Louise and Yellow Knife had married. I brought the news home to Aida like a peace pipe offered.
Baptiste and Louise
THE POWER OF MARRIAGE
He made a wedding bed for her in his mother’s house on sheets that were slick with the smell of him and oily to the touch. She scanned his room, trying not to look as if she were passing judgment. She rubbed her arms and fanned her face with her hands. Baptiste did not look at her. The small room seemed to surround her. Baptiste leaned forward and tucked the bed cloth under. He did not say a word to her as he made their bed. It was cool as a root cellar in the room but a small stain of sweat puckered the back of Baptiste’s white shirt. He worked without talking, straightening the sheet edge, punching the single pillow. He worked like a soldier. He did not ask for Louise’s assistance. When he had finished making the bed he left the room, closing the door behind him.
There was no clutter in the room, no boxes, no bottles, no paper or matchbooks, not even a shirt hung from the hooks that lined the wall. Louise was left alone. No clothing, no closets. There was one cigarette butt snubbed out on the dirt floor but it was curled with age. She wondered if a woman had smoked that cigarette but she felt no need to check for lipstick. The only thing that claimed Baptiste to this room were the four rattlers’ tails that hung from his bedpost. The bedsprings trembled when she placed her small purse down.
She stood for a moment at the door, listening to Baptiste and Dirty Swallow. She could make out a few words of Salish and she knew he would be a while. She was not surprised that her husband had left her in their wedding room to be with his mother. She imagined the cool breath of his mother’s voice, the stories she would tell him about new brides, the ways of women. She thought of climbing out his bedroom window and going into Perma for a beer or just settling for a pop at Malick’s. She wanted to sit outside as the evening cooled, find a ride with someone she didn’t know, go to a place far from Baptiste, because she already knew that even though she was drawn by Baptiste he could not hold her. She knew her feelings for him were already passing. What had drawn Louise to Baptiste was the hard chase. He wanted her. His wanting her had become all that mattered. Now that he was her husband she waited.
She was in Dirty Swallow’s house. The snakes would be lazy here, without power. She didn’t think they would strike her in her mother-in-law’s house because here it would be like striking themselves. She had married snake’s blood. She checked the window. The wood was rain split; the hinges were tight with rust. She rubbed her finger on the dust-clouded pane; still she could only see a smudge of the hillside beyond. Louise imagined snakes under Baptiste’s bed, uncoiled, sleek, and long as branches, sleeping on the cool dirt floor of his room.
The voices of Baptiste and Dirty Swallow made Louise lean close to the door. She peeked through the keyhole to see a small step stool, some of the wallpaper peeling and yellow, but she could not see them. She thought she could hear her name but the more she strained to understand the more their talk began sounding like coyotes in the early morning. She heard the word “night” twice. She heard her grandmother’s name. The more closely she listened the more their voices resembled wind or water or an animal wheezing.
There was a sad, smoky light in Baptiste’s room. Here and there light seeped through the cracks along the edge of the floor. Small burrowed holes trapped the sun. She thought of prairie dogs and gophers, all the small animals who had been stupid enough to dig under this house, stupid enough to find themselves looking down the tight throat of a diamondback, their instincts failed.
She looked again at the rattlers’ tails hanging on the bedpost. She stepped up close to count each section of growth, the length of the snakes’ lives. She lifted the tails up from the bed and held them close to her face, so close she could see small patterns of color, and her heartbeat rose in her throat. The rattlers were light in her hand and smooth to the touch. She looked into the pockets of their hollowness, holding each tail to her eye, turning them in her palm, each section shifting in balance, each section shifting small weight like heaviness. Each tail whispered like it was whispering to her and she listened but could not understand the power that had guarded her husband when he was still strapped to a cradleboard. What she heard was her own hard breath, the pale click of her teeth in the small, shadow-heavy room.
Louise had heard that the husband waits for the bride. The husband is left alone while the bride pinches her cheeks in the bathroom, while the bride perfumes her thighs and powders her breasts, while the bride washes herself again, cleans herself with hot water, hoping she will smell sweet as roses for her new husband. But Louise was the one who waited, knowing she smelled like tobacco smoke, a hundred swigs of beer. The perfume at her wrists had sharpened. She shook the tails again and again, finally taking the rattlers down from the bedpost, holding the tails up to her chest like small furious bells, hoping the sound might startle her husband to rescue her. But the door remained closed. She could only make a sound with the tails like an old man’s dry hands rubbing together. She remembered the rasp of brittle paper blown against grass before the rattler had struck her sister. She sat down on the bed. She lit a cigarette and remembered that her grandmother had not raised her voice when Baptiste had told her they were going to be married. “You’ll both be unhappy,” Grandma said. He had stood before her grandmother in his white shirt so stiff with starch that every time he shifted, the shirt had chafed his neck with a sound like Sister Sebastian whispering in church. In the dusky light Baptiste’s hands were so dark she could not see his veins. He had frowned, and she had wondered then if he knew her grandmother had spoken the truth.
She knew she was now part of the oldest kind of marriage, a marriage of blood power. She wondered if what she really felt for Baptiste was only urgency to reclaim what Baptiste had taken from her. She did not feel romance for Baptiste Yellow Knife. She sensed Baptiste could change her. Near Baptiste she noticed the dim scent of roots, the heaviness of her own breasts, the weighted curve of her womb. She could smell the woman’s blood in her and it made her long to be touched by him and long to be far from him at the same time. The desire for him was overripe in her. He made her feel unclean. She knew that Baptiste wanted to lay between the heat of her legs, but many men wanted to sleep with her, to wrench themselves inside of her, to claim her somehow. With Baptiste it was more than sex, more than just simple desire. The evening before she had left home her grandmother had told her Baptiste had sold the best part of himself to own Louise. “His spell will turn on him,” she had said. “Someday, he will be bitten back.”
Louise remembered stories of love medicine. Love medicine so strong it gripped, love medicine so strong men would leave their wives and families to chase a woman, an ugly woman without teeth, a woman with warts on her breasts. She used to laugh at the idea. She used to hold her sides and cross her legs when her grandmother sat stern faced, telling her the old stories of love and desire.
She liked the story of the woman who fell in love with her sister’s husband. The woman fell so hard in love with her brother-in-law, her grandmother had said, she put the love medicine on him, a bad medicine that shot up the slick cord of his spine, a medicine so strong it peeled the skin of his heart. The medicine clicked her name in his bones. He left his wife sleeping, on a black winter night. He stood up in his thin shorts with a hard-on so big it pulled him toward her. The March weeds shivered around him but he kept running toward her, toward her small house. When he found his sister-in-law with another man he chased him out of the house, chased him up into the hills and told him to never come back. The woman was so happy she took her brother-in-law to bed. Her medicine had worked better than she had hoped. He was the best lover she had ever had. He could make love all night. And when she turned from him he would still be poking her. She had found heaven. But soon she began waking up, waking up at three and four in the morning and he would be on top of her, his penis hard as a bull horn, even harder than he had been the night before. He would not eat, and when she would sit down to have a meal he would rub up behind her chair until she would slap at him. Even her dog was better company.
His wife began to stand outside her house, the wind tangling her long hair, stand outside for hours with her small children wailing, calling him back, her own sister calling. But he wouldn’t look outside. He wouldn’t even lift the curtain for a moment. She would tell her brother-in-law it was time to leave. She would tell him that his wife was waiting for him. He would just follow her around from room to room until his ragged shorts wore thin and fell off of him. Still she told herself she liked the looks of him. But then when she would go to visit her relatives he would put on a pair of her pants or one of her dresses. He would stand outside waiting for her, pacing her cousin’s house, cupping his hands to the windows, with a hard-on, always with a hard-on, always with whining eyes, his worm lips trembling with tears. And her relatives didn’t like her much either. They recognized love medicine when they saw it. She had stolen her sister’s husband. And if she could steal her own sister’s husband she could take theirs, too, or worse.
The sister-in-law got tired of her sister’s handsome husband. She went back to her sister and begged her to take him back. But her sister had finally set up with another good man. So the sister-in-law tricked the man outside and locked all of her doors and pressed cardboard to her windows. Three days later he was still standing outside her house. He began pressing his face to the locks at her doors. If there were any gaps in the cardboard at her windows he would find them. She would see his watery dark eye blinking at her. He would call her name again and again until his voice grew hoarse and whispery. Then every third day or so he would fall asleep. She knew this because he would stop knocking on her door, or pounding on the sides of her house. She would sneak away then but he would always find her. And he would chase away her friends when he walked toward her, his hard-on straining one of her old dresses. She would tell him to go away. She would shoo him like a cat but still he followed her. She threw back at him the knots of his hair that she had once carefully gathered from his favorite chair. She gave him back the small bits of clothing she had snipped from his clothesline. She gave him back all the things that held him to her but those things had gained their own power. She could not release him.
He haunted her for years. She had to leave her home and all the people she loved but even then he followed her.
For a short time Louise had thought about using love medicine on the rodeo roper to pay him back for ignoring her. When she had asked her grandmother about herbs and blood her grandmother had laughed. “You don’t need love medicine, Louise. If you used love medicine on any man you’d kill him.” Louise did not expect her grandmother to laugh. She thought her grandmother would scold her, warn her of danger. Her grandmother had once told her that love medicine could wear itself out, break like a tight knot pulled. Love medicine runs its course. Louise didn’t really believe Baptiste Yellow Knife had put the medicine on her. But her grandmother had warned her Dirty Swallow was using her medicine, all of her medicine to hold Louise to Baptiste. “Baptiste is not the man for you, Louise, maybe no man is the man for you. That’s OK too,” her grandmother had said. “Fight this. Anyone under the spell of love medicine never believes they are.”
